10x Engineer
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10x Engineer
1–10 of 186 posts
Re: 10x Engineer
#2tl;dr: denial of the 10X productivity we all observe in practice in any large group. Implies its not true until an 'official study' says its true, regardless of vast empirical evidence that supports this obvious fact.
Re: 10x Engineer
#3If I'm being generous, I'm a slightly above average engineer. Spot me 10X and I'll outperform any engineer on the planet. Do I believe in the 2X engineer? Definitely. 3X? Sure. 5X? Possibly, if their name is Ritchie or Torvalds or the like. But 10X? What I do in a week, they'd only get 4 hours. What I do in a year, they'd get 5 weeks. Doesn't exist.
Re: 10x Engineer
#4tl;dr: denial of the 10X productivity we all observe in practice in any large group. Implies its not true until an 'official study' says its true, regardless of vast empirical evidence that supports this obvious fact.
That's a misleading summary. No one is saying that all engineers are equal.
Re: 10x Engineer
#5If I'm being generous, I'm a slightly above average engineer. Spot me 10X and I'll outperform any engineer on the planet. Do I believe in the 2X engineer? Definitely. 3X? Sure. 5X? Possibly, if their name is Ritchie or Torvalds or the like. But 10X? What I do in a week, they'd only get 4 hours. What I do in a year, they'd get 5 weeks. Doesn't exist.
It's possible they can do things you can't do at all or can't do in a reasonable amount of time so 10x is certainly possible simply because they could have far superior knowledge.
Re: 10x Engineer
#6If I'm being generous, I'm a slightly above average engineer. Spot me 10X and I'll outperform any engineer on the planet. Do I believe in the 2X engineer? Definitely. 3X? Sure. 5X? Possibly, if their name is Ritchie or Torvalds or the like. But 10X? What I do in a week, they'd only get 4 hours. What I do in a year, they'd get 5 weeks. Doesn't exist.
I think the issue is that you compare the 10x programmers to the average programmer. The original source say that you can see an order of magnitude of difference between a good and a poor programmer. Haven't you ever done in a week what a poor programmer took a month to (poorly) do?
Re: 10x Engineer
#7If I'm being generous, I'm a slightly above average engineer. Spot me 10X and I'll outperform any engineer on the planet. Do I believe in the 2X engineer? Definitely. 3X? Sure. 5X? Possibly, if their name is Ritchie or Torvalds or the like. But 10X? What I do in a week, they'd only get 4 hours. What I do in a year, they'd get 5 weeks. Doesn't exist.
The 10x "mythology" doesn't mean 10x productive as an above-average engineer. It means 10x productive as the least-productive.
So think of somebody who would consider you a 3x. Now the engineer who is 3x relative to you is just about 10x to them.
Now consider the developers with net-zero or net-negative productivity. The 10x rule wildly understates how much more valuable a good engineer is relative to them.
Re: 10x Engineer
#8One of the many problems with the 10x Engineer concept is that it imagines that skill is a single dimension, when in fact it depends massively on context, environment, and the specifics of individual experience and the problem at hand.
I am definitely not a 10x anything, but my group once got handed a massive data-processing task that my supervisors--better coders than me, to be sure--believed was impossible to automate, and budgeted 200+ man-hours to do manually. I asked them to hold off for a minute and successfully automated the entire process in three days. That doesn't mean I'm an all-purpose supercoder; it means I happen to be really damn good at analyzing patterns in data sets. Give me work that I'm good at, but don't expect me to be that good at everything.
Re: 10x Engineer
#9If I'm being generous, I'm a slightly above average engineer. Spot me 10X and I'll outperform any engineer on the planet. Do I believe in the 2X engineer? Definitely. 3X? Sure. 5X? Possibly, if their name is Ritchie or Torvalds or the like. But 10X? What I do in a week, they'd only get 4 hours. What I do in a year, they'd get 5 weeks. Doesn't exist.
There is speed of execution but also speed in recognizing that some work can be avoided. It's hard to measure how much work is spared by taking the right decisions.
Re: 10x Engineer
#10If I'm being generous, I'm a slightly above average engineer. Spot me 10X and I'll outperform any engineer on the planet. Do I believe in the 2X engineer? Definitely. 3X? Sure. 5X? Possibly, if their name is Ritchie or Torvalds or the like. But 10X? What I do in a week, they'd only get 4 hours. What I do in a year, they'd get 5 weeks. Doesn't exist.
I just finished reading the Mythical Man Month, and while it was certainly very good, the part of the book on 10X engineers struck me immediately as a gross oversimplification. Are there people that are 10X more productive than their worst peers? Absolutely. Are there people that are 10X more productive than the average peer? doubtful, or at least not consistently so, depending on their personal life and/or the nature of their workload.
The OP's opening "I was a 10x engineer for 7 months and then I was a 0x engineer for a year and a half." pretty much sums it up. I think many of us have at least felt to be in both places at different points in our lives. A "10Xer" can be loaded down with dreary (or extremely challenging) tasks that can send their "productivity" off a cliff. Either they burn out, or the nature of their work requires more "breakthroughs". If they are wise enough to refuse always saying yes to their bosses, they can become a wet blanket, which can also seemingly affect their perceived productivity.